


What would you do?

by RandomPerson064



Category: Hello Neighbor (Video Game)
Genre: Except there isn't any satanic things and he doesn't find anything, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, It's the neighbor saying things, Kinda, Like, Not Beta Read, POV Second Person, Set during the time the player was trapped in the neighbor's basement, Stockholm Syndrome, Well - Freeform, You are the neighbor, drug injection, sedatives, the neighbor finds a son in the player
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24047689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RandomPerson064/pseuds/RandomPerson064
Summary: The boy that had snuck his way inside your basement was skinny. Terribly skinny, almost like he starved at home. You locked him in a room inside said basement as soon as you got your hands on him. He had seen way too much as he ran around your house, searching for keys in such a clever way you could barely believe he was just a kid.
Relationships: Mr. Peterson | The Neighbor & Nicky Roth | The Player
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	What would you do?

**Author's Note:**

> Hello there! I just finished Hello Neighbor and was really inspired to write something like this.  
> I'm not a native English speaker and this was not beta read, so reviews are very welcome here.  
> If you want this to continue, you can say so in the comments :D  
> Thank you so much, I hope you guys enjoy this.

The boy that had snuck his way inside your basement was skinny. Terribly skinny, almost like he starved at home. You locked him in a room inside said basement as soon as you got your hands on him. He had seen way too much as he ran around your house, searching for keys in such a clever way you could barely believe he was just a kid.

He is sleeping now — of course he is, after the strong dose of the drug you injected inside him — on a lone mattress. You don’t have any proper beds for him, but you do have some blankets and you were taking it to him. You go down the stairs, unlocking the door to his room to find him awake, looking at his arm. It’s bleeding, he apparently tripped and fell in the garden while he was running away from you earlier. He seems lost, and you think maybe it’s the drug calming him down.

“Let me see,” you say, putting down the blankets beside him, and only then he seems to notice you, stumbling away and curling against the wall. You get up and grab a first aid kit you kept in the wardrobe inside the room, before looking at the boy again. He’s looking at you, staring with those big black eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you,” you assure him before looking at his arm. “Can I see?”

The boy slowly shows you his arm. It’s just a scratch and you waste no time cleaning it up and bandaging it. “Are you tired?” you ask, to see the boy nod slowly. “I brought you some blankets, so you can warm yourself.” You look at his clothes, the tears on his shirt, his missing shoes, making a note to bring him some new clothes when you come back with food. “You can go to sleep, no one will bother you here.”

The boy nods again, getting up from where he was sitting and slowly walking towards the mattress. He lies down, and you cover his little body with the covers. He’s staring at you, slowly blinking, and you pet his head for a while before he finally falls asleep.

* * *

You visit the boy frequently in his room, bringing food, clothing and even toys for him. You like him a lot, he seems different from all the other bratty kids you locked inside other rooms in the same basement he was in. Those had dirty little mouths, screaming obscenities at you, calling you names and you didn’t like that at all, so you left them to starve to their deaths.

This one is nice. He still hasn’t told you his name, maybe it didn’t even cross his mind because of the drugs you’re using to keep him calm, but he is a nice kid. 

He’s staring at the fake window with his doll in hand, seeming lost, as he often looks like. The boy closes his eyes slowly, almost drifting off, before opening them again and suddenly he asks you: “Can I go outside?”

Your eyes widen. It’s one of the first times the boy has ever spoken to you and it surprises you, because the last time he said anything was when you brought him a gramophone, and he muttered a “thank you” under his breath. To add to your surprise, you really hadn’t expected him to ask such a question, to process enough thoughts in his tiny, drugged, tired mind to say something like that.

“No,” you answer, softly. “Don’t be sad, it’s just… You aren’t allowed to go outside. Never. Under any circumstances.”

He looks at you, seeming like he’ll fall asleep any moment now. The drugs keep him asleep for most of the day and, when he’s awake, he still does everything in a snail’s pace. He mutters an “okay”, before stumbling his way to the mattress, almost falling face down on the floor twice. The boy lies down and says, slowly:

“I wanted to shower, I smell bad. And I wanted to see the roses in the garden again, they’re so pretty…”

And then he drifted off into a quiet slumber, closing his eyes. You covered his body with the blankets, warming him up before leaving.

This boy was going to be the end of you.

* * *

You’re watching television late at night when, suddenly, you hear something fall on the grass. You sprint towards the source of the noise, closing the door behind you, and see the boy staring at the roses, a wooden crate in his hand as he slowly picks up some flowers and puts them in it. His eyes are focused again, like the roses are the only thing he can see, but you are infuriated. He betrayed your trust.

“What are you doing, boy?” You growl, drawing his attention away from the flowers. It was out of sheer luck that he decided to come out late at night when everyone else is sleeping. What would you have done if one of your neighbors saw him? They all know you don’t have kids. “What did I tell you about going outside?”

“You… told me I couldn’t go outside,” he says, and you’re not sure he understands what he’s done wrong or why you are so mad at him.

“Exactly! So what are you doing here?”

The boy bites his lower lip, seeming nervous. He had taken a dose of the drugs just a few moments earlier, so he had to take his sweet time thinking words and getting them out of his mouth.

“I had a nightmare,” he says, slowly. “And the window fell… somehow… the door was unlocked. There were some stairs… I came out from over there,” the kid pointed at some trapdoors that led into the basement. “I was going to call for you… but the roses are so pretty…” you hear a sob and see the tear tracks on the boy’s face, he finally understood what he’d done wrong. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

You approach him slowly, picking him up. He is so small compared to you, and you feel when he falls asleep in your arms. It was the drugs, he didn’t really mean to betray your trust, to come outside. He wasn’t going to run away. It was the drugs that confused his tiny little mind and made him scared enough to try to come to you. He is probably hallucinating right now too, the poor thing, but it’s better to have him sedated, when he can barely think straight, than having him running around the house and, eventually, out of it.

You put him on your bed, the only one in the house. You can sleep in the couch tonight, or in that chair close to him so you hear when he wakes up and make him some decent breakfast before giving him another dose.

* * *

The boy is lost in his own head again. He hasn’t spoken a word since the incident where he left the basement, and it didn’t seem like he was going to say anything soon. You tried to cheer him up, playing and dancing with him, but the only sounds you got out of him were tiny laughs.

He has his favorite doll in hand: a beautiful blonde plastic girl with many types of clothing he could put on her (a Barbie). He liked her more than the superhero one you brought. The boy plays with her, pretending she was dancing with her one true love, before approaching the window, staring at the drawing that you made with him to put at the window next to the other one that pretended he was inside a house. 

“Are you mad at me, sir?” he suddenly asks, surprising you with the sound of his voice.

“Why would I be mad at you?” you ask in return. “Did you do something that could make me upset?”

“I’m… I’m not sure,” he answers, slowly. He’s figuring things out inside his own head, you let him finish his thoughts, place the words in his mouth. “My daddy didn’t like when I played with girl dolls. He… he used to beat me up for it.”

The words pain you to hear. This boy, he doesn’t deserve that kind of abuse, he’s so special and sweet and loving, you know he is. The one time he made you mad was when he left the room and went outside, but he meant no harm. He was just scared. You want to hold him, give him one of your famous bear hugs, hug the pain away from his small body.

“Your daddy was stupid,” you decide to tell him. “You shouldn’t get beat up when you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“You’re nice to me, sir,” he suddenly says and it warms your heart. “You feed me when I’m hungry, you bring me dolls and play with me, you bring me music and dance with me. I… I don’t want to upset you.”

You open your arms, offering him a hug, and he walks towards you. You hold him for a while, petting his brown hair and you whisper:

“You are such a good kid.”

* * *

Your brother, Noah, is coming to visit. You don’t really like him, he’s always bragging about his job, his paycheck, his wife and kids, because he knows you don’t have any of that to begin with. You work in an office, filling sheets and signing paperwork, that pays you well enough that you can keep your house. For a while, you did have a wife and kids, but she died in a car accident and you lost your kids custody and now you are completely alone. The lawyers didn’t deem you sane enough to keep them.

You probably aren’t completely sane, but you’ll never know for real.

You have these visions, these twisted memories and omens that haunt you some days. Angels telling you to do right by the lonely kid and make their bully disappear, telling you that the brats that keep ruining your bushes should learn their lesson. You’d lock them in rooms that seemed so much like actual rooms inside a house, and they’d cry out for help where no one could listen. You left them to starve to their deaths often and had well-placed bear traps placed around the garden, practically unnoticeable, for whenever they managed to escape. They always did, for some reason, and would end up with infected wounds. The ones that got out were always the ones that died quicker.

You are preparing the house for your brother to come visit, making the bear traps close so you could remove them safely. You probably won’t need them anymore, there aren’t many bratty kids around like there were a few years ago. Your brother is coming with his family and after they leave, you’ll get the boy a nice warm bath, he really did want to get clean. He probably needed some new clothes too, because the ones he is wearing are all torn up.

Noah, as always, arrives earlier than expected. It always pisses you off, because most of the time he catches you in a sticky situation. Over the years, you got used to it and started preparing for his visits in advance.

While he talks and talks and talks about himself, you just smile and listen, your head wandering to the boy you captured. He, unlike your brother, often stays silent, only saying things that he really knows are important.

After he told you that his father used to beat him up for playing with girl dolls, you asked him abut his parents. The boy, in his shy way, confessed to you that his mother had died when he had been born and his father didn’t like him so much.

He told you — in very few, messy sentences that you had to figure out in your own head — that he, once, kissed another boy on the cheek in school. He thought the boy was nice and handsome, but he and his friends beat him up for it, calling him words he didn’t understand but you certainly did. Then, when he got home, his father beat him up again, locked him inside the closet and didn’t feed him for the entire weekend.

Then, you asked him why he came to your house. He told you he was just playing around, he saw you locking your basement, he heard screams, and he wanted to see what was inside it. So he ran around your house, got the keys he needed and now that he knew there was really nothing inside but empty rooms, he thought he was crazy. His father usually told him that, apparently.

“Hey, are you listening?” Noah suddenly asks, surprising you. You decide to surprise him back.

“What would you do if one of your boys kissed another boy in school?” getting no answer, you continue. “Would you beat him up? Would you lock him inside a closet and not feed him for days? Tell me.”

“Where is this coming from?”

“Just a couple of thoughts. Tell me, what if one of them wanted one of those Barbie dolls? Wanted to play dollhouse? What would you do?” you ask him, before getting up and filling a cup with water.

“Are you completely insane?”

“Of course not. I met this kid, a couple weeks back. A boy, same age as your youngest son. He told me his father thought he was crazy, beat him up and didn’t feed him for days because of those things. It just... stayed in my thoughts,” you told him a baked half-truth. “I’m living my life. Waking up, going to work, complaining about taxes. And while I’m doing all that, there is a boy that lives a couple blocks away getting beat up for playing house and kissing another boy on the cheek. Crying inside a locked closet, all alone in the dark.”

Your brother leaves earlier than expected. He probably thinks you’re crazy, and you probably are too. His wife doesn’t like you, his kids don’t like you, but you don’t really need them, because there is a boy locked in your basement that thinks you are nice, that you are worth it.

You go down the stairs and see that the boy is waiting for you.

“Want to go outside for a while?”

The way his eyes bright up and his smile burn their way inside your mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I hope you guys enjoyed this.  
> If you want this to continue, again, feel free to say so in the comments. I really appreciate reviews on my works, because I'm eager to get better.  
> Thank you so much for reading this!


End file.
